Genesis 22:1–14
There are certain passages of Scripture that greet us like old friends. We hear the words, “The Lord is my shepherd,” and something within us begins to settle. Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” and we find ourselves breathing a little more deeply. Saint Paul reminds us that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and we are reassured that even our greatest fears cannot overcome God’s faithfulness.
Then there are passages like Genesis 22.
This is not one of those comforting texts we instinctively return to when life is difficult. It is a story that unsettles us. It asks us to climb a lonely mountain beside Abraham and Isaac. We watch a father carry fire and a knife. We watch a son carry the wood. We listen as Isaac asks the question that echoes through the centuries: “Father… the fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb?”
If we are honest, this is one of those passages we almost wish were not in the Bible. It challenges our understanding of God, our understanding of faith, and even our understanding of love. For generations Christians have spoken of this as the testing of Abraham, and certainly it is that. Abraham’s trust is stretched beyond anything we can comfortably imagine.
Yet I wonder if we have spent so much time asking what Abraham is doing that we have neglected the deeper question the story is really asking.
Who is God?
Every sermon ultimately rises or falls on how we answer that question. Before we ask what God requires of us, before we ask what faith demands, before we ask what sacrifice means, we must first ask who God is. Every other theological question grows from that one.
That question seems especially fitting today.
Just a few moments ago, we witnessed the blessing of the vows two people first made to one another. We heard them promised fidelity, patience, forgiveness, companionship, and love. They reminded all of us that covenant is never simply words spoken on a wedding day. Covenant is something we choose to live every day. Love is not sustained by emotion alone. It is sustained by grace, by forgiveness, by perseverance, and by the daily decision to place another person’s well-being alongside our own.
As we come to the close of Pride Month, I find myself reflecting on that same mystery of love. Throughout this month there has been much conversation about identity, belonging, and the nature of love itself. Christians have not always entered those conversations well. Too often we have been quicker to draw boundaries than to build bridges, quicker to speak than to listen, quicker to judge than to bless.
But before we say anything else, we must remember the words of Saint John:
“God is love.”
Notice what John does not say.
He does not merely tell us that God is loving.
He tells us that love belongs to the very being of God. Love belongs to God’s essence.
Everything God does flows from who God is.
That single sentence has become one of the foundations of my own faith. It has shaped how I understand Scripture, how I approach ministry, how I care for those who are grieving, how I celebrate love wherever it is faithfully lived, and how I seek to engage a world that often seems increasingly divided.
If God is love, then every page of Scripture must ultimately be read through that truth.
That does not mean ignoring the difficult passages. It means allowing them to be illuminated by the fullest revelation of God we have received.
For Christians, that revelation is not an idea.
It is a person.
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
Everything begins there.
The Incarnation is not simply the story of Christmas. It is the foundation of Christian theology. God did not remain distant from human suffering. God entered it. God took on flesh. God knew friendship and betrayal, laughter and tears, celebration and grief. In Jesus Christ we discover not simply what God says, but who God is.
Whenever I find myself wrestling with a difficult passage of Scripture, I return to Jesus.
If I want to know how God responds to human suffering, I look to Jesus.
If I want to know how God sees those whom society rejects, I look to Jesus.
If I want to know how God understands power, mercy, forgiveness, and justice, I look to Jesus.
Jesus becomes the lens through which the whole of Scripture comes into focus.
That brings us back to Abraham.
The first people who heard this story lived in a world where the sacrifice of children was not unimaginable. The gods of the surrounding nations were often believed to demand terrible offerings. Their favor was earned through fear. Their power was maintained through violence.
So, when Abraham begins climbing the mountain, the original listeners probably believed they already knew how the story would end.
They were wrong.
And that may be the most important surprise in the entire passage.
The first listeners to this story probably believed they already knew how it would end.
The father would obey. The son would die. The gods would be satisfied.
That was the world they knew. That was the story they expected.
But then, in a single moment, everything changes.
Just as Abraham raises the knife, heaven interrupts the silence.
“Abraham! Abraham!”
The voice calls his name not once, but twice, as though to stop not only Abraham’s hand but the entire way humanity had come to understand God.
“Do not lay a hand on the boy.”
The knife never falls. A ram is caught in a thicket. Abraham names the place, “The Lord Will Provide.”
For me, that is the heart of this passage.
God stops the knife.
That simple sentence reveals something extraordinary about the God of Abraham.
The God revealed in Genesis is not like the gods of the surrounding nations. God does not demand death in order to prove divine power. God is not nourished by violence. God does not delight in suffering.
Instead, God interrupts violence and provides another way.
The story is not simply about Abraham’s faith. It is about God’s heart.
Sometimes I think we have spent so much time admiring Abraham’s obedience that we have overlooked the astonishing revelation taking place before our eyes. Genesis 22 is not simply the story of a faithful man. It is the story of a God who refuses to become what humanity expected the gods to be.
The knife stops. Mercy begins.
That moment echoes throughout the rest of Scripture.
As Christians, however, we cannot remain on Mount Moriah.
We continue our journey until we arrive at another hill outside Jerusalem.
There, too, we find wood carried upon weary shoulders. There, too, we encounter suffering. There, too, we stand before one who gives himself completely in love.
Yet even here we must be careful.
If we begin with the cross apart from the Incarnation, we can easily misunderstand both.
For many years Christians have sometimes spoken as though the cross revealed an angry God whose justice required violence before mercy could finally be offered. While I understand why faithful people have spoken that way, I have come to believe that the Gospel invites us to begin somewhere else.
We begin with Christ himself.
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
Before there is a cross, there is a manger. Before there is suffering, there is presence. Before there is sacrifice, there is love.
The Incarnation tells us that God’s first response to the brokenness of the world was not condemnation.
God’s first response was presence. God came among us.
That changes everything.
When we read Genesis through the life of Jesus, we discover that the God who stops the knife is the same God who welcomes children instead of sacrificing them, who touches those others avoid, who shares meals with sinners, who forgives those who betray him, who weeps beside the grave of his friend Lazarus, and who prays for those who nail him to a cross.
When Philip says to Jesus, “Show us the Father,” Jesus replies, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
Those words have become one of the guiding lights of my own faith.
Whenever I struggle with a difficult passage of Scripture… I look to Jesus.
Whenever I wonder what God is like… I look to Jesus.
Whenever I find myself tempted to believe that fear, violence, or hatred somehow have the final word… I look to Jesus.
Christ does not erase the Old Testament. He reveals its deepest meaning. He shows us the heart of the Father.
That is why I believe the cross is not the story of a God who delights in sacrifice. It is the story of a God who loves us so completely that he enters fully into our suffering rather than remaining safely distant from it.
God does not watch human pain from heaven. God bears it.
God does not stand apart from grief. God weeps.
God does not merely command us to love. God loves first.
And because God has entered our humanity, there is no place we can go where Jesus has not already gone before us.
No hospital room. No graveside. No broken marriage. No shattered dream. No lonely night. No threshold of grief or uncertainty.
There is nowhere the Incarnate Christ has not already walked. That is why hope remains possible even when life feels unbearable. Not because suffering is somehow good. But because God refuses to abandon us within it.
The resurrection then becomes God’s final declaration that death, hatred, violence, and fear will never have the last word.
Love will. Always.
And once we begin to understand that, we discover that sacrifice itself must be understood differently.
The Christian life is not built upon giving things up because God somehow delights in our loss. The Christian life is built upon giving ourselves away in love because that is what God has first done for us.
Parents know something about that. Those who care for aging parents know something about that. Hospice workers know something about that. Anyone who has kept a promise through difficult years knows something about that.
Love always costs us something. But genuine love never diminishes life. It creates it.
Perhaps that is why every true act of love becomes, in its own small way, another incarnation of God’s presence in the world.
If the God revealed in Jesus Christ is a God whose first response is presence, whose very nature is love, and whose mercy interrupts violence, then the question naturally becomes this:
What kind of people is God forming us to become?
The Apostle Paul answers that question with words that are as challenging today as they were two thousand years ago:
“Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.”
Notice what Paul does not say. He does not call us to become dead sacrifices laid upon an altar. He calls us to become living ones. Lives shaped by grace. Lives that become visible signs of God’s invisible love.
Perhaps that has been the purpose of sacrifice all along. Not the surrender of life. The offering of life. Not destruction. Transformation. Not fear. Love.
Throughout my years serving as a hospice chaplain, I have come to believe that some of the holiest moments in life are also the most ordinary. I have watched husbands quietly hold the hands of wives who no longer remembered their names. I have watched daughters patiently care for aging parents. I have watched nurses, aides, volunteers, social workers, and family members return day after day, often exhausted, because love simply refused to leave.
Most of those people would never describe themselves as making a sacrifice. They would simply say, “I love them.”
Perhaps that is because genuine love never keeps score. It does not ask first, “What do I receive in return?” It simply gives itself.
That insight has led me back to a group of theologians who have increasingly shaped my own thinking: the ministers and scholars of New England’s New Divinity movement.
History sometimes remembers them only as successors to Jonathan Edwards, but I think they deserve to be remembered for something even more significant. They believed that the Christian life was never simply about holding correct beliefs. The Gospel was meant to form a particular kind of people.
To describe that life they used a phrase that sounds unfamiliar today: disinterested benevolence. It is an awkward expression, but a profoundly beautiful one.
They did not mean detached love or indifferent love. They meant love that has been set free from self-interest. Love that seeks another person’s good simply because that person bears the image of God.
The more I have reflected on those words, the more I have become convinced that they are simply another way of describing the Incarnation itself.
Why did God become one of us? Not because humanity had earned such love. Not because we deserved redemption. Not because God expected something in return.
God came because that is what love does. Love always moves toward the beloved.
The Word became flesh because love refused to remain distant.
Once we begin to understand that, the Christian life changes. We stop asking, “What is the least I must do?”
Instead we begin asking, “How can I love more faithfully?”
That question changes marriages. It changes families. It changes congregations. It changes communities. It changes how we care for the grieving. It changes how we welcome strangers. It changes how we speak to people with whom we profoundly disagree.
Because if every person bears the image and likeness of God, then every encounter becomes holy ground.
As we prepare to celebrate Independence Day this week, I find myself thinking about those ministers who stood in New England pulpits nearly two hundred and fifty years ago. Men like Samuel West believed that liberty was never merely a political idea. It was first a theological conviction.
Human freedom mattered because human beings belonged to God. The image of God came before the rights of citizens. That distinction matters just as much today as it did then.
The Church has a responsibility to speak whenever human dignity is denied, whenever fear is used to divide us, whenever violence threatens to eclipse compassion, or whenever any person is treated as though they possess less worth than another. Even when a pastor is trying to be silenced by those who disagree.
But the Church must always remember why it speaks. We do not speak because we belong to one political movement or another. We do not speak because we seek influence.
We speak because Jesus has first spoken to us.
Our public witness must always arise from Word and Sacrament. From prayer. From worship. From lives continually being transformed by grace.
Otherwise, we become just another voice competing in the endless noise of the world.
One of the great temptations of every generation is to believe that we can change hearts by winning arguments.
The Gospel suggests another way.
Jesus changes hearts by revealing the love of God.
The Church is called to do the same.
That means we speak the truth. But we speak it in love. Regardless of the cost. We pursue justice. But we never abandon mercy. We defend the vulnerable. But we never forget, and this is important that even those with whom we disagree remain people created in the image of God.
The Gospel will sometimes challenge the powers of this world. Indeed, it must. But it can never do so by forgetting the dignity of the very people it hopes to transform.
For love is not simply one Christian virtue among many. Love is the very life of God made visible among us.
And whenever that love becomes flesh in our lives, the Incarnation continues.
Perhaps that is the vocation of the Church.
We gather around Word and Sacrament not to escape the world but to be transformed for it. Every time we hear the Scriptures proclaimed, every time we gather around this table, every time we pray together and share Christ’s peace, we are being formed into people whose lives begin to reflect the One we follow.
The purpose of the Church is not simply to preserve the faith. It is to embody it.
The Incarnation did not end in Bethlehem. Nor did it end on Calvary. Nor did it end with the Ascension. The Incarnation continues wherever the Body of Christ makes the love of God visible in the world.
That is the Church’s calling. It is our calling.
There is one final thought I would like to leave with you, and perhaps it is a little more personal.
This is my final Sunday with you. Like every ending in the Christian life, it is also a beginning.
Over these months we have worshiped together, prayed together, laughed together, and sometimes we have wept together. We have gathered around this table. We have listened together for God’s voice in Scripture. We have tried, however imperfectly, to become a community shaped more by grace than by fear.
Those gifts do not disappear simply because one chapter has come to its conclusion.
Over the years I have come to understand much of ministry through the image of a threshold. A threshold is neither the place we are leaving nor the place we are entering. It is the sacred place in between. It is the place where we discover that God is already present before we arrive and remains with us long after we have departed.
Today, we stand on such a threshold.
Like many who have spent their lives serving Christ’s Church, I have known moments of extraordinary joy. I have also known disappointment, misunderstanding, and wounds that took far longer to heal than I ever imagined.
For a time I believed those wounds might define my ministry. Instead, by the grace of God, they transformed it.
The risen Christ still bears the wounds of the cross. Not because Easter failed. But because redeemed wounds become signs of love rather than signs of defeat.
That has become one of the deepest truths of my own life. Hurt does not have to become bitterness. By God’s grace, it can become wisdom. Wounds can become wells of compassion.
Perhaps that is why I have come to believe that the people most capable of extending mercy are often those who have needed mercy themselves.
So, if life wounds you, and it will, I pray that you will resist the temptation to let those wounds harden your heart.
Instead…
Let them deepen your compassion. Let them enlarge your capacity to forgive. Let them remind you that every person you meet, yes, even ministers are carrying burdens you may never fully understand.
Every one of them bears the image of God. Every one of them is worthy of dignity. Every one of them is loved by Christ.
There is an old New England belief that has always fascinated me.
It was said that when a craftsman built a house, something of the builder remained within it. His hands shaped the beams. His labor became part of the walls. His life somehow lingered within the home long after the work was finished.
Whether that is literally true is almost beside the point. The image is true.
Whenever we give ourselves away in love, something of us remains behind.
I believe that is true of ministry. A part of my prayers will remain here. A part of my hopes will remain here. A part of my laughter, and yes, even some of my tears, will remain here.
And I know that a part of this congregation will remain with me wherever Christ now calls me. That is not sentimentality. It is Incarnation. Love always leaves a holy trace.
If there is anything I hope you remember from my time among you, I hope it is not a particular sermon, or a particular phrase, or even a particular season of ministry.
I hope you remember to keep looking for the sacred in ordinary life. Look for Christ in the face of your neighbor. Look for grace around your family table. Look for holiness in acts of kindness that no one else notices. Look for the image of God in those who think differently than you do. Look for hope even when grief convinces you there is none.
Above all, never forget that the God we meet in Jesus Christ is not a God who stands far away from human life.
He is Emmanuel.
God with us.
He walks beside us in every joy and every sorrow.
He stands with us at every bedside.
He meets us at every table.
He waits for us at every threshold.
And He always goes before us into whatever comes next.
So, as we prepare to leave this place today, remember what Genesis has been trying to teach us all along.
The God of Abraham is still the God who stops the knife. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is still Love made flesh. The Holy Spirit is still leading God’s people into new beginnings.
The Lord still provides.
And because that is true… We need not be afraid.
Go into the world loving generously.
Serve sacrificially.
Forgive freely.
Welcome joyfully.
Seek justice humbly.
Walk gently.
And wherever life leads you, help someone else discover the sacred hidden in ordinary life. For that is where Jesus so often waits to be found.
Amen.
Preached on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, on the occasion of the renewal of marriage vows and my final Sunday with this congregation. With gratitude for all who have taught me that love, indeed, leaves a holy trace.
